They just got a different tool to use than we do: They kill innocent lives to achieve objectives. That's what they do. And they're good. They get on the TV screens and they get people to ask questions about, well, you know, this, that or the other. I mean, they're able to kind of say to people: Don't come and bother us, because we will kill you. Bush - Joint News Conference with Blair - 28 July '06

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Brown Cabinet Gets Some Iraq Critics

New Prime Minister Gordon Brown appointed some critics of the Iraq war to his youthful circle of senior Cabinet ministers Thursday, underlining his ambition to heal rifts over the conflict and win back the support of disenchanted.

Brown has pledged to examine Britain's role in Iraq - a subtle shift in language from his predecessor and perhaps his first diplomatic challenge in his relationship with the Bush administration, which considered Tony Blair its closest ally.

David Miliband, who at times criticized Blair's Middle East policy, was named foreign secretary - an eye-catching appointment by the new prime minister.

"The opportunities and challenges of the modern world requires, in my view, a diplomacy that is patient as well as purposeful - which listens as well as leads," said Miliband, a rising star in the Labour Party who at age 41 is the youngest British foreign secretary in three decades.

Both he and Jack Straw, who was appointed justice secretary and lord chancellor, criticized Blair for not insisting on an immediate cease-fire when Israel went to war last summer with the Islamic militants of Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Miliband, the son of leftist Jewish academics who is married to an American violinist, voted to support British participation in the Iraq war, but he has voiced concerns about the conflict.

Brown also gave posts to John Denham, a former minister who quit the government in 2003 to protest the Iraq invasion, and Mark Malloch-Brown, a former deputy U.N. secretary-general who clashed with American neo-conservatives.

Malloch-Brown, now a lord, had fierce spats at the U.N. with then U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, who accused the Briton of discrediting the world body with his criticisms of the White House.

As deputy to U.N. chief Kofi Annan, Malloch-Brown derided President Bush for what he called "megaphone diplomacy" on Darfur by trying to persuade Sudan's government to accept a U.N. peacekeeping in Darfur, but refusing to defend the organization to Americans.

Malloch-Brown's appointment to a junior role as minister for Africa, Asia and the United Nations could be an attempt by Brown to distance Britain from the Bush administration, said analyst Alex Bingham at the Foreign Policy Center think tank.

Denham, the war critic, also got a relatively minor post, secretary for innovation, universities and skills.

Brown wants to win back the trust of voters who bitterly opposed the Iraq war, and invited families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan as he made his first leadership speech Wednesday. He also plans to reverse restrictions on Iraq war protests around Parliament.

Brown said in a statement that one of three British soldiers killed Thursday in a roadside bombing in Iraq was from the Scottish constituency he represents.

"My thoughts and prayers are with the families of all the fallen soldiers, who died bravely serving their country," he said. Link

db: Brown was a senior member of the Neo-Labour cabinet that took us into a disastrous and illegal Iraq war, hanging off the coat tails of the torture president and his neoconservative criminal friends. However some of the choices above are indeed impressive in terms of signaling 'a change of direction' that might be more than rhetoric. Ten years ago we felt kind of positive about Blair too, dimwits that we were. Brown needs to work very hard.

"War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere,
or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to
make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too
intelligent."George Orwell

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship
in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to
establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object
of torture is torture. The object of power is power."George Orwell

The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who
use the abstract words of glory, honour, and patriotism to mask the cries of the
wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief. They
know the lies the victors often do not acknowledge, the lies covered up in
stately war memorials and mythic war narratives, filled with stories of courage
and comradeship. They know the lies that permeate the thick, self-important
memoirs by amoral statesmen who make wars but do not know war. The vanquished
know the essence of war - death. They grasp that war is necrophilia. They see
that war is a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and destruction.
They know how war fosters alienation, leads inevitably to nihilism, and is a
turning away from the sanctity and preservation of life. All other narratives
about war too easily fall prey to the allure and seductiveness of violence, as
well as the attraction of the godlike power that comes with the license to kill
with impunity. But the words of the vanquished come later, sometimes long after
the war, when grown men and women unpack the suffering they endured as children,
what it was like to see their mother or father killed or taken away, or what it
was like to lose their homes, their community, their security, and be discarded
as human refuse. But by then few listen. The truth about war comes out, but
usually too late. We are assured by the war-makers that these stories have no
bearing on the glorious violent enterprise the nation is about to inaugurate.
And, lapping up the myth of war and its sense of empowerment, we prefer not to
look.Chris Hedges

Armaments bring only disasters. When one accumulates them, this damages
the economy, and if one puts them to use, then they destroy people on both
sides. Consequently, only a madman can believe that armaments are the principal
means in the life of society. No, they are an enforced loss of human energy, and
what is more are for the destruction of man himself. If people do not show
wisdom, then in the final analysis they will come to a clash, like blind moles,
and then reciprocal extermination will begin.Khrushchev to Kennedy

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Disobedience is the foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
[Henry David Thoreau]